Dear Rio,
Against all odds, you were conceived in a lighthouse, born into a pandemic, learned to crawl through democratic and industrial revolutions, and tasted enough of Life as We Know It to be resentful when it was gone.
Sorry.
I regret that we broke the sea and the sky and shortened the nightingale’s wings.
I regret that the Great Barrier Reef is not greater, that we value the Amazon much more than O Amazon, and that the beachfront neighborhood where you’re growing up could be doomed by rising sea levels before you’re old enough to apply for a mortgage.
The Earth I joined in 1967 no longer exists and no one knows what kind of planet will replace it.
The United States of America that I knew and loved is also gone, devoured from within by metastasized lies that fuel angry people in forgotten places.
But I’m definitely no sorry you’re here. In fact, I’m so happy that his mother’s 42-year-old single ovary surprised us with the most adorable little boy nine months later on vacation in Croatia, my grandfather Miller’s homeland. That’s where we found a Dubrovnik lighthouse on Airbnb, and until you know what it’s like to fall in love, the story will bring mortified looks, but I can’t think of any better omen for the kind of boy we hope to raise – a solid source of light for those who need it most.
I can present mountains and oceans, penguins and lemurs. I can watch you taste wild blueberries and see your expression the first time you hear your sister, Olivia, sing on stage. We’ll open tents from the Boundary Waters to Baja, and you’ll feel the adrenaline that comes with birdsong at dawn and no plans for the day. We will taste wonders made by water and wind and the hands of ancient women and men, and you will find many kind souls to remember as you build a better world on the wreckage of our mistakes.
Looking back at what’s left, it may be difficult for you to understand how we could have let things get this way.
You will turn 30 in 2050 and I want to believe that reality will be back by then and that you will read this as soon as you are ready for the big questions. By then, you’ll know whether the Enlightenment turned deadly, whether the Age of the Irrational broke out like a fever, and what happened to the Red Hat President.
Maybe your world is a world with hydrogen airships instead of diesel tractor trailers and stingray-shaped robots that sink seaweed to bury carbon instead of industrial fishing trawlers that clean the sea. Maybe your buses take you to school in sunlight and help stock your classrooms after dark. The world’s most abundant fuel source may be isotopes in seawater, or small nuclear fusion stars in boxes, or minerals mined from an asteroid called Psyche, somewhere between Mars and Jupiter.
Right now, River, there is a spacecraft also called Psyche in the sky, and the other day NASA turned on the solar- and xenon-powered propulsion system that will send this tennis-court-sized American invention across the galaxy at a higher speed. . at 124,000 miles per hour! You’re four now, and when you turn six, Psyche will circle Mars, and when you’re nine, we’ll get our first photos of an asteroid so rich in precious minerals that the trip might be worth it.
Selfishly, I’m glad you’re here to keep me fit, educated, and fun because, believe it or not, Your Old Man used to be fun. Ask around.
I used to lead pub crawls, skydive and fight for longer airtime for my crazy mistakes. Covering sports in Green Bay, Chicago and Los Angeles was much easier than covering the weather. For one thing, when the Bulls lost to the Jazz, no one called the station to argue that Karl Malone was a Chinese hoax. And no matter how much it hurts when our teams miss the playoffs, the beauty of sports is that there is always next season. On this show, every day I’m forced to think about what will happen if the seasons end.
Olivia arrived in 2003, when the wounds of 9/11 were still fresh, and we moved across the country and settled near the hole that once housed the Twin Towers. I was a cub network anchor, and between reporting on trips to Iraq and Afghanistan, Katrina and Fukushima, I watched his sister and One World Trade Center grow by astonishing leaps.
And American history has changed in surprising ways.
She was 16 when I first held you in the crook of my arm and felt the curl in your Tic Tac toes and in her lifetime our nation went from a so-called War on Terror to new wars with new, homegrown terrors. My old man did duck and cover drills for Russian missiles, I did them for tornadoes, Olivia did them for school shooters, and you might have to worry about all of that.
We brought you home from a plague and into the Age of Unreason, where gun violence had just surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death for children and your first kiss from your mother came through a mask that smelled like cigarette smoke. fire. At this point in the pandemic panic, faceless, soulless internet profiteers were charging $600 for a box of N-95, so Mom used the leftover mask from my hospital travel kit, last used to cover a spot on fire called California.
You entered a locked-down world, with a death sign in the corner of every screen, where people dressed like astronauts emerging from the airlock to walk their dog in the empty streets. We sanitize the mail, forget to turn on the sound, drink too much and cry. And while the Red Hat president instigated an impromptu rage in the background, I would rock you, inhale the delirious scent of your little head, and thank the universe that you came with a Canadian passport.
After spending the day drinking from the hose of peer-reviewed scientific dread, I still continue to stare into the middle distance, but so much good also happened during the first four years of his life that I now wake up with more wonder than worry.
“As?” I can hear my colleagues echo it with enthusiasm. Because we are made of stories that never end.
Now, more than ever, human stories will be the difference between destruction and salvation. Old stories brought us here, but new ones can take us away. They are the most powerful things we have and they start with the stories we tell ourselves. For example, there’s an old story that most Americans either don’t know the Earth is overheating or don’t care. This story was so sticky that if I had asked my average compatriot in 2022 to guess the percentage of fellow citizens who are concerned about climate change and support action, they would have said between 37 and 43%.
See more information: Don’t Ignore Your Climate Anxiety
In reality, researchers at Princeton, Boston College, and Indiana University found it to be 66 to 80 percent.
“Proponents of climate policies outnumber opponents two to one,” the study authors found, “while Americans falsely perceive nearly the opposite to be true.” They call this “pluralistic ignorance,” which means we are surrounded by allies we never knew we had. At the same time, while two-thirds of Americans say they are at least “somewhat concerned” about global warming, the same percentage say they talk about it with friends and family “rarely” or “never.”
River, this means that change for the better depends on the brave and lucky few who are born with the means and freedom to start conversations and the conviction to use those means and freedom no matter what.
The day I first saw her wrinkled little face, I went from ultrasound to a climate march led by Greta Thunberg. By the time you read this, you will be able to find volumes written about how she was canonized and demonized, but back then I knew her as a young woman her sister’s age who had captured the world’s attention by leaving school every Friday- fairs to stage a solitary climate strike outside the Swedish parliament. When we first met, she entered the interrogation room silently with her hand-painted protest sign tucked under her thin arm, and quickly showed a mind curious enough to digest scientists’ warnings that others were ignoring, and honest enough to call the attention to the problem. arrogant ignorance and ignorant arrogance of all responsible adults. Her work has connected millions of people to allies they didn’t know they had, and that post-ultrasound march was proof that the story may be changing.
After a century and a half of burning our fuel because it was cheap, the cheapest form of fuel man has ever known now comes from solar-powered batteries and onshore wind energy. And that’s why, despite fierce partisan and industry resistance, Texas produces more of this clean energy than California.
It’s not the end of life.
It is the end of “as we know it”.
And climate change on a degraded planet is not a problem created or solved by physics or technology. It’s a problem created and solved by stories.
River, you have a good chance of seeing the 22nd century!
And when you get there, I want you to tell us how we came together, solved our problems, and wrote a better story.
Extracted from Life as We Know It (Could Be): Stories of People, Climate, and Hope in a Changing World by Bill Weir. Published by Chronicle Prism, an imprint of Chronicle Books. Copyright © 2024 by Bill Weir.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
